Harry Potter!

I know I'm REAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLY late on the bandwagon, but I have to tell this story so that others don't make the mistake I did...

I never got on the Harry Potter bandwagon; figured it was silly; figured I wouldn't really like it. And despite the fact that everyone who read it told me it was brilliant, way more than a kids' fantasy book, so so so amazing, I just thought "meh". So much so that no matter how many times M suggested I read it, I just told him I probably would - someday. As in, 10 years from now...
So when the sixth movie came out on DVD, and M was going to watch it, I said I'd watch with him. "Are you sure?" he asked. "It gives a lot of stuff away. What if you decide to read the books"... But I insisted. By the time I got to the books, I'd have forgotten anything important, surely. So I watched the movie a few months ago, and that was that. And I still had no plans to read the book...
And then this summer I had several book "misses" - picking books up that had received GLOWING reviews and finding them just not that good. Sometimes not even getting through the whole thing. Disappointed. Always looking for the next good one... and there was M, sitting on the couch, partway through the last book, seeming to really enjoy it and I finally decided "why not? I can't find anything good to read anyway"... And I picked up the first one, and basically didn't look up for 3 weeks, until I was done the last one. So good. So unbelievably amazing.
I want to be J K Rowling. Short of that, I want to be her best friend. I want some of her genius to rub off on me. Best sustained series of writing I've ever read. No character is a stock character; no back story is left unexamined. You care about EVERYONE. For 7 books, for thousands of pages of writing. And when it ends you want it to keep going but at the same time it ends so perfectly that you can't imagine what would come next. I cried.
Except.
Except I'd watched the sixth movie and something REALLY huge happens at the end of the sixth movie, and all through the series, I couldn't forget about this detail I knew that I shouldn't know, and I was so upset with myself that I already knew this, and that it coloured my whole perspective, and that I read certain things that should have been read one way except I knew, I knew! so it wasn't the same....
So, read Harry Potter if you haven't already for goodness sakes. The movies are NOTHING compared to the book. Not even close... and if you haven't already seen the movies, wait! and if you have, it's ok, read the books anyway. You'll still love them. You can't not love them. Trust me.
and then you'll want to be JK Rowling's best friend too...